


Homecoming

by whatisgentle



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Team as Family, aka anti-ross, anti-accords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 13:54:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11922294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatisgentle/pseuds/whatisgentle
Summary: As it turns out, the world still needs its superheroes.Or, it takes the Avengers 361 days to heal. But it’s not like anyone’s counting.





	Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for CA:CW. They aren't huge, but there are a couple. This is more my take on what happens after civil war anyway. 
> 
> Sorry if none of this makes sense, I just have many feelings. 
> 
> All the mistakes are mine. This isn't beta-read.

It takes the Avengers 361 days to heal. But it’s not like anyone’s counting.

-

Bucky doesn’t allow himself to hurt until they’re together on the jet.

He allows himself to become numb, spread on the floor of the base, after Stark blasts him arm off as if it were tissue paper. He watches Steve fight – riotous in clear panic – as his body struggles to make sense of what he should be feeling. His mouth tastes like metal. At some point, he thinks he latches onto Stark’s ankle, if only to win Steve a few seconds.

He watches unmoving as a metal foot connects with his skull. There’s loud a crack, but no pain.

It’s Steve who manoeuvres his body off the ground and onto the jet. He lets Steve push him onto one of the benches, hands firm but soft and warm, and buckle him in with fingers that tremor ever so slightly.

It’s when the jet lurches into motion, oddly jerky, when his brain finally crawls back from semi-consciousness. He makes a motion with his neck to look down and pain flares in his shredded shoulder.

Bucky _screams_. He screams into his right hand – his only hand, his flesh-and-blood hand, which is cold to the touch – and pushes his face into Steve’s chest. Steve, who is warm and covered in blood, rests his forehead against the back of his neck and whispers him meaningless words like _breathe, breathe, Bucky, breathe_. His neck is wet with Steve’s tears, and probably a bit of saliva – because Steve was always a messy crier on the rare occasions he cried – and Steve’s blue chest is damp with his own tears.

Through the pain, Bucky allows himself to marvel at the fact that he can still cry.

-

Tony drinks his way through the Avengers complex until there is nothing left. FRIDAY refuses to buy anymore. He can’t remember if it was him, Rhodey or Pepper who made that protocol, but he’s thankful for it anyway. He crashes for the first time in… well a long time, and sleeps for a total of what his IA tell him is ten hours.

Which is a crazy long time, especially for him.

In his lab, Tony initiates Protocol 69 – which is not quite as bad as it sounds, it just means nobody but Pepper can gain access to the lab, and it’s not like she’s around to do that anymore – and makes a few new bots, including DUM-E 2 for no reason what-so-ever, before getting started on the working model of Rhodey’s leg braces he’s been slowly planning in his head.

Steve’s parcel turns up after two weeks.

Pepper turns up after three.

Rhodey’s her friend too, she tells him, but can’t help but feel she’s there for him too – if only a little.

-

Bucky’s in the hospital for days before Steve’s allowed to go and see him. His ribs are almost completely healed, but they still ache, and his face is still slightly puffy and dotted with scabs and fading bruises. Bucky looks worse than him – his healing factor is not as strong as Steve’s – and he sits slightly lopsided in bed, unused to having the weight of his arm missing.

“Howard,” was the first thing out of Bucky’s mouth. “You knew.” It wasn’t a question.

Steve sits on the end of the bed, feeling too large, too clumsy; the way he always has, even when he was 5”4 and ninety-five pounds soaking wet.

“I knew it was HYDRA. I suspected,” he admits. “But it doesn’t change anything. Bucky – it wasn’t _you_.”

Bucky shakes his head, his face transforming into something terrible and utterly heart-breaking behind long strands of brown hair. Steve things of all the possible arguments he could make to Bucky – none of which he knows Bucky would listen too or wants to hear.

He wishes he could take Bucky into his arms the same way Bucky did for him after scraping him off the ground in some Brooklyn alleyway or during the war when it all just became too much.

He’s not brave enough to move.

Bucky was always the brave one.

“Tony was wrong,” Steve tells him, firm. The unspoken _I choose you_ hangs in the air between them.

Bucky sighs, then reaches across the sheets until the backs of their hands brush together.

-

Natasha turns up at Wakanda with no announcement after a month with the red book. Steve’s not surprised. She’s cut her hair shorter again, more like it was in Washington. It’s more vibrant then it’s been since Steve’s known her – like one big _fuck you_ to Ross.

T’Challa takes her arrival surprisingly well for someone who was tasered by one of her bites. He smiles when he sees her.

“I didn’t understand,” he tells her, “but now I do.”

The truth about Zemo is broadcasted internationally the next morning.

Natasha helps him break out the rest of the Avengers from the Raft.

-

Bucky was silent around the rag-tag Avengers for a long time, his expressions guarded.

It’s surprisingly Natasha who drags Bucky into a resemblance of his older self. Older, full of sorrow, with new quirks and different expressions, and a love of peanut butter – which is weird, because Bucky used to hate peanut butter.

They have a funny slightly odd Russian frat thing going where they talk in Russian, and Natasha calls him James rather than Bucky. Steve swears he heard him call her Natalia once, but he might have imagined it. Clint, in all his wisdom (aka the only other person among them that can speak Russian), informs them they all they do is drink vodka, sharpen knifes and talk about the best ways of killing people as some sort of backwards-therapy.

Steve half-believes him.

It’s sweet, if slightly scary.

-

After T’Challa’s medical team finally let Bucky out of their clutches – don’t get him wrong, he’s grateful and all, but hospitals and white coated doctors still make him feel slightly sick – he decides to go back into cryo.

He tells T’Challa first, who seems to understand, and then Steve.

He knows the decision will break Steve’s heart, but it’s the best option – _for everyone_ – until he knows he’s not a ticking time bomb which could be set off at any moment.

He doesn’t want to hurt anyone anymore.

-

Wanda’s had nightmares since she was ten. Pietro did too. They used to deal with together, in each other’s arms as the night raged past them. Nowadays she wakes alone, a familiar ache in her chest which still hasn’t gone away, and walks until the shadows don’t seem quite so dark anymore.

Wakanda is a blessing in that way. It’s _freeing_.

She likes Scott, the same way she likes Clint. They’re fatherly, but in a fun-loving way. And neither of them are afraid of her, despite knowing what she is capable of.

She likes Bucky too, before he goes in cryo. He looks at her softly, like she’s a girl not a witch. He talks to her in Sokovian and together they watch _Great British Bake Off_ reruns in his hospital room.

It takes weeks before she starts deliberately using her powers again, and another month before the control the Raft (and Stark, and Ross) had taken away from her returns. She uses it liberally, and makes the team laugh when she rips Sam’s bottle of orange juice from his hands in the morning.

-

Tony gets better. Slowly. Sort of.

Pepper kisses him for the first time in six months and makes him see a therapist Maria Hill (who went poof one day and vanished off the face of the earth, and handed in her one-week notice _after_ she had left, but apparently Pepper has her secure number in her contacts) recommends.

Tony, call him sentimental, keeps Cap’s brick of a phone in his pocket. He thinks about calling, but never does.

-

It’s Wanda who helps Bucky with the trigger words, as well as a team of Wakandan doctors and Natasha.

-

Bucky’s thawed after five months in cryo. The process is heart-breaking to watch. It takes what feels like forever for Bucky to come to, and even longer for his body to stop trembling beneath the blanket one nurse had draped kindly over his shoulders.

To Steve, he looks painfully young – pale under the florescent lights, and almost fragile. Steve _loves, loves,_ _loves_ him so much it hurts, and grieves with a helpless fury behind the one-way mirror into the medial ward – because it’s all too easy to image Bucky’s post-cryo listless body being pulled around in some Russian/Nazi lab by unkind hands.

The room is emptied of doctors, leaving only Wanda and Bucky behind. Seated on the stainless steel lab table in the middle of the room, Bucky curls into himself, pressing his forehead to his drawn-up knees. Steve’s chest aches to see him so small.

“Ready, Buck?” he asks into the speaker.

Bucky lifts his head – his eyes are impossibly wide, and blue, and empty – and nods.

Silence grows heavy. Steve’s throat is dry, and his tongue feels like sandpaper. Natasha had painstakingly taught him the ten words, and had wrapped up his fist after he’d put it through a wall after reading _Freight Car_.

Seriously, fuck HYDRA.

“ _Zhelaniye_ ,” he says. And Wanda’s hands dripped with scarlet. And Bucky’s eyes close again.

It took four hours.

It worked.

-

Bucky lets Steve cut his hair one evening.

T’Challa’s team build him a new arm.

-

Despite T’Challa’s promise that they could all stay, the team break off and globetrot from crisis to crisis, helping where they can.

Wanda and Sam go to South Sudan to help with the relief agencies, Clint and Natasha try and prevent the damage spilling over from Syria, Lang meets up with contacts he has in Mexico, and Bucky and Steve build houses, and close human trafficking rings, and aid peacekeeping efforts.

They help people, and use violence only when necessary.

Captain America erodes, and Steve feels more alive than he has since 1945.

“This feels right,” Steve tells Bucky, and Bucky understands.

They go to Paris for one weekend. Steve hasn’t been there since the Liberation, and Bucky distantly remembers going there as the Winter Soldier. But he can’t always connect the dots between faces, names and places.

Bucky smiles at him, and kisses him in front of the Montmartre.

It doesn’t matter that they’re internationally wanted criminals. It feels like coming home.

-

The Parker kid is too young and too reckless, but keeps on trying to help.

A blue blob shows up on national news as it begins to devour Missouri. There is no S.H.I.E.L.D. ( ~~HYDRA~~ ) to clean up the problem. Tony goes instead.

But as it turns out S.H.I.E.L.D. isn’t as dead as people believe. Neither is Coulson, for that matter.

Tony’s not sure he can take anymore plot twists, sue him.

-

It’s Thor, with his tales of Infinity Stones and space invaders who finally bring the Avengers back together.

Tony makes the call. Cap picks up on the second ring.

“Tony?”

-

Tony knows that it wasn’t Barnes’ fault. Knows that Barnes is as much a victim as anyone. He knew before Natasha had sent him all the files she had on the Winter Soldier via one of her super-spy, completely untraceable email accounts.

HYDRA had made Barnes into a weapon, stripped him of his agency. It doesn’t make sense to blame a gun for shooting someone, you blame the person who fired the gun (or the person who made and sold the gun in the first place).

He also knows that Cap was right not to trust Ross. He knows that he’s not exclusively responsible for people dying or for Ultron. He still doesn’t trust himself, but he gets it now. Someone like Ross is cable of doing monstrous things because he’s not doing the killing – he’s directing it.

-

T’Challa pulls out of the Accords first, followed by the most of Europe, then the UK, then the majority of Asia.

The Avengers are pardoned. So is Barnes.

-

As it turns out, the world still needs its superheroes.

Tony returns Cap’s shield – only he’s _Steve_ now, because they’re on a first name basis – and falls into a sort-of friendship with Barnes. Bucky is a good guy, if slightly terrifying.

-

It takes the Avengers 361 days to heal.

They save the world again – together.

 

 


End file.
